The real story behind Isaac Newton's apple

One of the most famous anecdotes in the history of science is when young Isaac Newton was sitting in his garden an apple falls on his head and he suddenly comes up with his theory of gravity. But there was no evidence that Newton was really inspired by a falling apple. The truth is that he was particularly obsessed by the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, and eventually reasoned that the influence of gravity must extend over vast distances. After seeing how apples always fall straight to the ground, he spent several years working on the mathematics showing that the force of gravity decreased as the inverse square of the distance.